The Gift of Naughty Pictures

Yeah, right. Selfies are one thing, and maybe even sexting if you’re daring, but full-on professional photos of you in your panties?

Well, why not?

Valerie Schooling Durant of Valerie&Co Photographers in Mount Pleasant offers boudoir photos. She specializes in making you feel beautiful. Clients come to her before weddings, after children, when they just need to get their mojo back.

Women come to her feeling fierce or feeling forlorn. We all tell her this kind of thing is outside our comfort zone.

“As women, we look at billboards, TV, and magazines and we think, ‘I am not as pretty’,” Schooling Durant says. “Our standard is professional models, people who take pictures and pose for a living, and we compare a photo we take on our iPhone and it’s not fair.”

Sadly for men, Schooling Durant doesn’t do boudoir photos of men.

“I do boudoir, not dude-oir,” she says.

So, it’s all about women. We may feel wildly uncomfortable, but we put on panties, bustiers, corsets, heels. Whatever we’ve chosen in advance and brought with us. We get professional makeup and hairstyling at the studio. And then Schooling Durant works her magic.

“What if I said you are the most beautiful person in the world and you say in your mind, ‘I know.’ That look. That’s the look I want,” Schooling Durant says.

The photo shoot takes about an hour and a half, and women usually change three times into different lingerie looks.

For those of you afraid these photos will come back to haunt you, Schooling Durant emphasizes she doesn’t do nudes and that her photos are tasteful.

“A man looking at Hustler, his end isn’t thinking romance…he’s thinking, ‘I’m going to take this magazine into the bathroom’,” she says. “The results of a man seeing boudoir photos of his beloved? He is going to think, ’my woman is hot, I’m the luckiest man in the world. ' ”